TechRadar recently caught up with David Cooke, director of the British Board of Film Classification, along with Mark Dawson, one of the BBFC’s leading games examiners, to discuss, among other things, the recent Byron Review, the Manhunt 2 saga and to find out more about what the BBFC thinks about the future of videogame classification and age-ratings in the UK.

(You can read the first part of this interview here)

TechRadar: There have also been concerns and questions posed by ELSPA about things like funding and logistics. Who pays for BBFC examiners such as Mark here? Who pays the BBFC? And second to that – might there be questions of additional delays to games coming to market, because an extended BBFC system might take longer to classify games?

David Cooke: Well the second point is the easier part of that question to answer. We are faster than PEGI, at the moment. And we’ll try and keep it that way. We turn round games, on average, in ten calendar days (not working days) which is at least as fast as PEGI, probably faster.

TechRadar: Is there an average time it takes for you to examine and rate a game? 

Mark Dawson: It generally depends on the game. With a game like Grand Theft Auto IV, for example, which is one of the most recent titles we have rated, it was something like 15 or 16 hours, for each of the two examiners playing it.

David Cooke: But that is of course exceptional. There’s a hell of a lot in the game!

Mark Dawson: I would say that we probably allocate around 5 hours per game on average.

David Cooke: On the money front, I think we’ve calculate that there are around 25% of the games that we do that work out cheaper than PEGI, then there is a chunk that are more expensive.